


Neptune

by LLReid



Category: Queen of Thieves (Voltage Visual Novel)
Genre: Angst, F/F, The Gilded Poppy, Venice, dyslexic writer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-18 16:10:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21630355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LLReid/pseuds/LLReid
Summary: || “You should hate me! It would be so much easier if you would just hate me!” ||Fic takes place early in Vivienne’s second season and is inspired by Sleeping At Last’s song ‘Neptune’.
Relationships: Vivienne Tang/Katerina Leyva, Vivienne Tang/Main Character
Comments: 4
Kudos: 50





	Neptune

It shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did to have Katerina push her away. After all, when Vivienne had drugged her and then left her in Paris she had been the one to dash any hopes of their relationship ever progressing. She had been the one to light the fuse, the catalyst that spurred the young artist into guarding her heart from her. She was the one who was to blame.

After so many years of not feeling very much at all, she’d been absolutely terrified when she’d suddenly started feeling things she hadn’t even been aware she was capable of feeling. Katerina hadn’t ever hurt her, yet Vivienne had done what she did best...she had hurt her before she ever had the opportunity to. She loved Katerina, she loved her with all her heart, and she knew that part of the girl still cared for her despite the fact she was unable to even look her in the eyes...she just didn’t know what to do with those feelings. Part of her wanted to hate her, wanted to run again...but she couldn’t. She didn’t know what it was about Katerina that made her feel like the only thing tethering her to the Earth, even when they were not on the best of terms. Only the truest of loves, only long empathy and identification and compassion, could possibly root another person in Vivienne’s heart so deeply that there was no escaping her feelings toward her, not ever; especially not when the only thing she hated about her was her capacity to be hurt by Vivienne, herself. 

Even hating her own heart offered her no relief.

The problem was that Vivienne just didn’t trust people very easily. Even Nikolai, who she did trust, had things he didn’t tell her, really important things, and it would have been nice to have a way to find them out without him having to tell her. She would know all the stuff she needed to know, but he’d still be okay. And then, with anyone else, literally anyone and not just Katerina, she could never be sure of what they were thinking about her, and she never did seem to be very good at guessing what it was. So, part of her thought that it would be nice to be able to just dip inside their heads, just for like two seconds, and make sure everything was okay — just to be sure that they were not thinking some horrible thought about her that she had no clue about or plotting against her — and then she could just trust them. If she had that power she wouldn’t abuse it or anything. It was just so hard not to ever know how to trust people without fearing them. It made her have to work so hard to figure out what they wanted from her. It had gotten to be so tiring...and so, so, very lonely.

“I wish you would talk to me,” she confessed, quietly, without looking up from the copy of Vogue Italia that was open in her lap. She wasn’t reading it. She’d merely been pretending to be engrossed in the latest trends whilst Katerina used her bedroom mirror to work on her self portrait.

“About what, Vivienne? What exactly is it that you want me to say to you?,” Katerina sighed. When her eyes left the glossy pages of her magazine she was greeted with the back of Katerina’s head as she continued to work. Her entire body was tense and far frailer looking than she had been when they’d picked her in New York, as if her emotional hurt was actually affecting her physically.

“Anything. Literally anything that doesn’t have to do with the job. Cry, yell, scream...just give me something.” She did her best to keep her voice even, to keep herself from actually crying in front of her as hysterically as she had been crying in private since the moment their lips had touched in Paris. Her life would have been easier if she hadn't loved her so much, but she couldn't help loving her. Just to look at her was to love her.

The young artist’s hand didn’t still and she didn’t look up from her work, but through the mirror’s reflection Vivienne could see her blinking back her own tears just as furiously as she was attempting to hold in her own. She was so close to her, yet she had never felt so far away. Like so many phenomena that were beautiful at a distance — thunderheads, volcanic eruptions, the stars and planets — this alluring and utterly soul destroying self inflicted pain proved, at closer range, to be completely inhuman in its scale.

“Do you have any idea how violating it feels to wake up and realise that you were drugged by a person you trusted?,” Katerina asked, quietly.

“I...no.”

“I know you didn’t physically take advantage of me when I passed out, but considering what usually happens when a woman is rendered unconscious by another person I think you might wanna start considering how your marks might feel after you use that lipstick on them. Just a thought.”

Vivienne gaped at her as guilt twisted her gut into knots. She’d never stopped to consider how her marks felt when the drugs wore off. Ever. Watching nature documentaries as a child she had often wondered what prey was feeling when it was captured. Often it seemed to become completely still in the predator’s jaws, as if it felt no pain at all. As if nature, at the very end, would show mercy for it. That was wishful thinking, she now realised.

“I— You— It—“

“I’m not interested in how you convinced yourself that you were doing the right thing. I just want you to think about it the next time you’re about to render another woman unconscious,” Katerina interjected, calmly, still without halting her work. “Other women who don’t know you won’t have the luxury of being certain that they weren’t assaulted whilst they were unconscious.”

Vivienne swallowed thickly, before draining the last drop of Armenian Whiskey from the crystal glass rested on the marble coffee table in the middle of the small sitting area in her bedroom. Katerina wasn’t trying to hurt her. She knew she wasn’t. Yet her words made her feel physically nauseous.

She’d first bought the lipstick as some sickening power play. It made her feel powerful to wear it, to use it for its intended purpose. There was an indescribable sort of power in being that untouchable. How terrible the whole world was, what an eternal struggle for power everything always bogged down to. Secrets were power. Money was power. Being needed was power. Power, power, power: how could the world be organised around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it, she wondered.

“I don’t know how to make this better,” she confessed. “I know that I hurt you and that just saying that I’m sorry will do little to fix things. But I am, sorry, I mean. I’m so sorry.”

At that Katerina stilled and looked up at her, their eyes locking in the mirrors reflection. It was the first time she’d actually looked her in the eyes since arriving in Venice, and all Vivienne could see was how deeply her hurt and betrayal ran. Vivienne’s life was already so fraught with unpleasantnesses that she’d adopted the strategy of delaying encounters with them as long as possible, even when the delay made it likely that they would be even more unpleasant when she did actually encounter them. Seeing exactly why Katerina had been refusing to look at her was like a knife to the heart.

Part of Vivienne wanted to believe it was better for her to be angry at her than to be so hurt; maybe even better than being loved and held by her. She wasn’t used to being treated the way Katerina had treated her in Paris. Part of her still screamed that anger was what she'd been feeling toward her all along, anger disguised as wanting.

“I know you’re sorry and I accept your apology...but I don’t know how to make this better either. I don’t know to make this less painful for either of us.”

“For either of us,” she echoed.

“You’re obviously hurting, too, Vivienne. That’s why you hurt me, isn’t it?”

Feeling suddenly more vulnerable that she was comfortable with, she was the first to look away so that she could pour herself another strong glass of whiskey. Being saw through like that was as jarring as being able to see Katerina’s pain in her eyes. It felt intimate and it made her feel out of control. People like her who needed to be in control of things all the time had a hard time with intimacy, it wasn’t a problem that was unique to her in any way, that she knew. Intimacy was anarchic and mutual and definitionally incompatible with total control. The only reason she felt the need to control things was because she was afraid.

“I’m not a good person, Katerina,” she said, before draining her entire glass in one gulp. “All I know how to do is hurt people.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is true!,” she snapped, as a single tear spilled over her lash line in frustration. She was having an outburst with no advance warning and it wouldn’t make anything better, yet she couldn’t reel it in. “For so long I have operated by Old World rules, the blurring of right and wrong into whatever I can get away with. Even when I don’t intend to hurt people, I do. My my mind is a horrid place to be at the best of times and I lack any sort of good judgement making skills. I can’t even blame anyone else for it, I’m just...I’m a bad person. A terrible person.”

She was sick of everything. Sick of envying, and sick of herself. She didn't understand antiques or architecture as intimately as she professed to, she couldn't draw like Katerina, she didn't read like Nikolai, she had very few real interests and almost no expertise outside of the realms of creating a criminal empire. A paucity for hurting people was the only true thing she'd ever had. Why Katerina couldn’t see that, she didn’t know. She could not pick out one thing about herself that was worthy of her kindness and affection.

“You may think that, but I don’t,” the young artist said, quietly, as she gingerly turned around to face her. “You seem a little challenged in the entitlement department. I mean, compared to the others...but that’s as terrible as it gets, from where I’m standing.”

“I got scared and then poisoned you and left you in Paris! How can you say that and mean it? You should hate me! It would be so much easier if you would just hate me!”

“Why would it be easier?” The shyness that had been there to begin with had returned when they spoke, Katerina seemed hesitant to even ask that question at all. Between Katerina’s shyness and Vivienne’s refined formality and her tyrannical rages she protected herself with so ferociously meant that if one loved her, as she knew Katerina did, she had learned that she could do her no greater kindness than to respect her privacy.

“Because then I couldn’t possibly disappoint you again. If you thought I was terrible and you hated me then I couldn’t hurt you.”

“Me hating you won’t achieve anything, Vivienne. Hatred isn’t some sort of armour that’ll protect me from getting my heart broken.”

“Then what will?”

“It’s not rocket science,” Katerina mumbled, whilst roughly wiping her eyes. “Literally just stop hurting me. Stop messing me around. Stop taking my choices away. Actually treat me with the respect you claim to have for me.”

She threw back another glass of whiskey so quickly that it stung at her throat and went over roughly. Her problem consisted of a burning wish not to have done the things she'd done...and the desire to suddenly understand how to love someone in a healthy way. She’d known for years how depressed she was, but it was harder to admit how depressed she was now that someone else could obviously see it, too. The thing about the games she played with people was that she didn’t want to look too closely at why she was playing them. A great yawning emptiness always underlined them, a close relative of the nothingness that lay beneath the surface of her skin.

“What exactly is it that you want from me, Katya?,” she asked, quietly.

“I don’t want anything from you, not anymore. Not until you make peace with whatever it is that’s hurting you so badly.” Slowly, the soft spoken American stood up and gathered up her art supplies into her arms. “I chased the Poppy here, not you. I care about you, Vivienne, and I’m here for you if you ever actually want to have a real and honest conversation but there’s only so much one person can take.”

She nodded and watched as Katerina started off towards the bedroom door. She walked briskly, her head down to hide the fact that she was on the verge of tears and her art supplies clutched so tightly to her chest that her knuckles turned white. It was another side of Katerina that she had never seen before — the fact that she so visibly had an other side — that was helping her finally understand all three of the dimensions her. That a woman could be sweet, sympathetic, comical and a lascivious, incapable of being self-aggrandising, or grudge-bearing, and also, crucially, a third thing: a flickering consciousness, a simultaneity of culpable urge and poignant self-reproach, a beautiful person in process.

Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, and weirdly claustrophobic: a sense of endlessness bottled up inside her, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shivering frail looking girl to escape through. Touching her was the farthest thing from Vivienne’s mind at that moment. The impulse was to throw herself at her feet and sob, but she refrained.

“Katya?,” she said, tightly.

The artist paused with her hand on the doorknob and glanced over her shoulder at her. “What?”

“It...it really is good to see you.”

Katerina nodded only once and then quickly slipped out of Vivienne’s bedroom. She’d left her favourite dusky pink knitted sweater draped over the back of her seat, but Vivienne knew she wouldn’t be back to get it until the next morning. The fabric of it was soft in Vivienne’s hands as she picked it up and held it close to her chest, smelling the familiar floral scent of her perfume lingering on it. 

She slid down the closed bedroom door and sat on the floor with Katerina’s sweater in her arms as she allowed herself to cry. Her feeling of having crashed did not consist of envy, exactly, or even entirely of having outlived a false version of herself that she’d tried so hard to become, in vain. It was more like despair about her own splinteredness.

Vivienne had always thought that the only way to know that she was a person, distinct from other people was by keeping certain things to herself. She had guarded them deep inside her, because, she knew that if she didn’t, there'd be no distinction between the inside and outside. Secrets had been the only way she had known she even had an inside for a long time. A radical exhibitionist was a person who had forfeited their identity entirely. But identity in a vacuum was also just as utterly dismal and meaningless. Sooner or later, the inside needed a witness. Otherwise she could have easily just been a cow, a cat, a stone, a thing in the world, trapped in her self imposed thingness. To have an identity, she knew she had to believe that other identities equally existed. She needed closeness with other people. And how was any meaningful closeness built? By sharing secrets. By surrendering to the mortifying ordeal of being known.


End file.
